April 10, 2008

Everybody loves a bank letter

As part of our continuing commitment to customer service we have taken the opportunity to review your account and note that there have been no credits to your account recently.

We shall be grateful if you wil ltelephhone us to discuss the situation. We would like to ensure that you are obtaining maximum benefit from your banking facilities. This may involve moving your borrowing onto a more appropriate lending product.

You can make payments into your account via our Internet payment facility. Log onto www.natwest.com/paybycard to make payments from your credit/debit card into your accounts.

If you have recently made a credit to your account, please ignore this letter.

Yours sincerely

Customer Service Manager

Dear Nat West

I am in receipt of your rather strange letter of 26 March observing that there have been no credits to my account recently and wondering whether I will telephone you to discuss the situation.

I do not think I will: in the first place, I live, as you are aware, outside the UK and unless you can assure me otherwise, my understanding is that such a call would be expensive for me to make. If you, on the other hand, wish to call me, you are of course welcome to do so and my numbers are appended below.

While I appreciate your aspiration to "ensure that you are obtaining maximum benefit from your banking facilities" I am perfectly satisfied with the present arrangement and do not remotely feel the need to move my "borrowing onto a more appropriate lending product". Indeed I am rather surprised that you raise the question at all. I am, by your own account, using only a small proportion of the overdraft facility which we mutually agreed would be appropriate: less than one-seventh, by my calculation. As your own figures above show, my balance remains at more than £1700 below the agreed overdraft limit.

Now, I don't actually recall making any agreement to make regular credits to my account. Not everybody who has a bank account is in receipt of a regular income and you were aware of that situation when we last agreed to renew my overdraft facility. I would not have requested its renewal had I not felt I might at some time need to use it and you would not have agreed to it had you not understood that this was possible.

This being the case, unless you're really under the impression that I propose to clean out my account to the full extent of my overdraft facility and disappear without trace – rather than, for instance, using a small proportion of an agreed overdraft facility with a degree of prudence and responsibility that could wisely be copied by many major financial institutions – would it be possible to cease troubling me with the suggestion that either my account or my financial conduct is in some way inappropriate?

I've been banking with NatWest for, I believe, a quarter of this century this coming October. If you think that's too long, then by all means say so.

NatWest swallowed my cashpoint card once when I was £800 in credit.I'd told them I was thinking of shutting the account because they'd charged me £20 for sending me a letter, and they decided to pre-empt me.

When I moved overseas I kept my Barclays account, which they promply closed (despite it having money in it) for "lack of activity". That was 15 years ago, so I'm glad to see British banking is still making an arse of itself wherever its clomping feet land.

Juat got an email from Triton. Have had a dormant Natwest a/c for 9 months, although they've still been charging for "monthly fees and letters". Never been a transaction on this account, ever. Natwest and whoever "Triton" is are pimps on the arseholes of us all. DO NOT RESPOND!This is a scam